Around commercial towns and in powerful states like Segu or Dahomey, slaves were a majority of the population, where they produced food and staffed the state. In desert-side areas slaves constituted 50 percent of the population; only in what is today southern Mali and eastern Senegal were slave concentrations small, and these areas served as labor reservoirs for more centralized societies to their north.

The institution of slavery in West Africa has been explained in part by the low population-to-land ratio characteristic of the region, which often resulted in a labor shortage. These shortages encouraged the expansion of slave labor, particularly once West Africa began to be drawn into commercial exchanges with the Atlantic world.

In West Africa, public health regulation was given the teeth that the 1902 law lacked in France.

Yet Roume's emphasis on the civilizing potential of mise en valeur challenges, from the outset, the view that France had one preferred means for uplifting Africans, and raises the general question of what other goals besides material progress the administration in Dakar as- sociated with the term "civilization." It also inevitably revives the age-old debate regarding the extent to which the French conflated civilization with not only mutually beneficial economic develop- ment, but becoming culturally French as well.

Although a precedent for such as- similation existed in the oldest French colony of the federation, the Four Communes of Senegal, the judicial, educational, and emancipa- tionist policies enacted by Dakar make clear that the new Govern- ment General rejected the notion that part of its civilizing mission was to make Africans into Frenchmen. Instead, these policies show, the French felt they were duty-bound to respect "traditional" West African customs and to encourage the peoples of the federation to evolve within their own African cultures, with one exception. This exception was if the custom in question was deemed to conflict with the principles of civilization as defined by the Third Republic.

Roume realized that the metropolitan school system, transplanted to West Africa, would not contribute to the kind of development the Government General now wished to undertake, ostensibly for everyone's benefit. This development re- quired greater African agricultural productivity and skilled workmen for infrastructure construction, not lycee graduates.

The first question to arise, therefore, when Dakar decided to unify the administration of justice, was whether French law should be extended to the interior. As had been the case with edu- cation, the Government General immediately rejected the assimila- tionist solution as impractical and prejudicial to the best interests of the colonized. Treaties, Roume pointed out, had been signed with African chiefs during the conquest, stipulating that African "cus- tom" would be respected throughout the federation. As a civilized nation, France was bound to honor these agreements. A fundamental principle of the new system was thus that African "customary law" would remain the common law of the federation and that French law would only apply in the cities.

What was true of the naturalization bill was equally true of adapted education, the decision to suppress certain customs, and the nonrecognition of slavery during Roume's tenure. In these instances as well, the French were not content simply to qualify Africans as barbarians. They were barbarians, in each instance, capable of-and in the process of receiving-republican civilization. By inaugurating policies that were consistent with France's revolutionary heritage, Roume here too managed to normalize the presence of so many sub- jects in a nation of citizens.

In principle, it can only be advantageous to choose a native chief from a family of the ethnic group that he will represent; indeed, we do not have the right to sacrifice the future of one race to the future of another; each people must conserve its autonomy relative to a neighboring people

To dissociate the parties created by the chiefs of the global territorial units is also to suppress, to make disappear, centers of resistance against us. To abolish the tyranny of one ethnic group over other ethnic groups is better yet to destroy the hostility of the ancient aristocracy, and attract to ourselves the friendship of those collectivities which, thanks to us, ac- quire an independent individuality.

The same school system could not by definition produce French-speaking interpreters and clerks and efficient peasant farm- ers; nor could it simultaneously introduce the French language and even a limited knowledge of French institutions, and prevent Afri- cans from aspiring to equality with the colonizer.

It thus made no sense to ask them to defend French national territory. Recruitment in this con- text could only turn them against France. "What," he asked in a di- rect rebuke to Panty, "do Africans care about duty to the mother- land?" France's entire approach to governing Africans, he concluded bitterly, was to treat them as French citizens each time it was a question of obligations and duties, and to treat them as subjects each time it was a question of rights or privileges.

Revolt broke out first in 1915, in the Western Sudan in the circle of Beledougou, located to the east of Bamako in an area inhabited by the Bambara peoples. … Subsequent analyses revealed that although hostility to recruitment was the immediate cause for the revolt, an overly zealous application of Ponty's circular on the poli- tique des races in the years preceding the war accounted for the chiefs' decision to turn against the French.

The period between 1914 and 1930 opened up a new era in the civilizing actions and assumptions of the Government General. French policy and ideology changed to reflect both transformations in the metropole and the political needs of the colonial state. These needs were starkly exposed by the revolts that had occurred during World War I and by the evolues' continued demand for political equality with French citizens throughout the 192o's. Such challenges made clear to federal authorities that they had made a mistake in at- tempting to divest chiefs of their authority and in maintaining all power in their own hands-two policies identified with France's civ- ilizing mission in West Africa. Dakar thus began to reconsider these policies even before the war ended. In particular, it recommended reappointing customary chiefs to office, and suggested a "new deal" for the educated elite. These policy changes were given a name fa- miliar in France and some colonies since the 189o's, but new in the Government General of West Africa in the 192o's: association.

Federal authorities now insisted that their subjects had institutions, such as the chieftaincy, which were not nearly so exploitative as the French had once thought and therefore deserved to be respected. These images sug- gested that the postwar governors general were becoming genuinely interested in understanding the different cultures of West Africa, and were now prepared to preserve them for their own sake. In fact, Da- kar's reassessment was motivated more by a desire to contain the evolues in particular, and to reestablish "discipline" among their subjects in general, than by any intrinsic interest in either African civilizations or democratization.

These people, Van Vollenhoven reminded the min- ister, once were welcoming; now they neither "like us or trust us." The situation was not yet desperate. But immediate action was nec- essary to redress the balance in France's favor.

France since the Enlightenment and the Revolution has succeeded in spreading its egalitarian credo and civilization across the globe. Ironically enough, it was least successful in this enterprise during the modern colonial period, when its claims to a civilizing mission in the name of the rights of man were greatest.

The term exploitation here is used in the French sense, which does not carry the pejorative connotations it does in English. In French, exploitation can best be translated as "development."

Roume rejected the possibility of creating a medical school in Dakar, such as existed in Madagascar and In- dochina, because of the insufficient "development of our African popula- tions." Instead, aides-medecins were to be trained in each circle by Euro- pean doctors.

Like the French in West Africa, the Americans had linked transportation and civilization in the mid-nineteenth century. This celebration of the creative impact of the railroad was, according to Schivelbusch, fundamentally different from the European reaction to the steam engine. In Europe, the mechanization of transportation had been as- sociated-at least initially-with the destruction of a traditional artisan cul- ture. But in both Africa and the United States, the perception was that steam power "gained a new civilization from hitherto worthless wilderness" (p. 91).

The colonial lobby was responsible for promoting the notion that the West African colonies were an imperial treasure-house, waiting to yield its bounty in direct proportion to the kilometers of railway laid across the great African expanses. This propaganda created unrealistic expectations from the outset about the ease with which the African interior could be rationally exploited.

The most important initiative for increasing African production was the cre- ation of peasant societes de prevoyance in I9IO. Conceived originally as vol- untary cooperatives for seed distribution and local credit, the few that ex- isted were taken over by the administration in I 9 I 5.

While its foreign trade amounted to 275,997,6I 5 fr., the respective figures for the next two richest colonies, Guinea and Ivory Coast, were 36,650,245 fr. and 25,839,820 fr.

Because this was what the French called their special African courts, and the term helps to convey the ideology of the period, it has been retained.

French refusal to intervene in civil customs affecting women gener- ally seems to have persisted throughout the colonial period. It is presum- ably linked to a similar refusal in the metropole to grant women the same rights as men under the Third Republic. … But there appears to have been nothing comparable in West Africa, for example, to the "female circumcision" debates which con- vulsed colonial Kenya in the 192o's.

All Africans who were not considered assimiles qualified as subjects of the French Empire. From a legal point of view, an assimile was treated like a European and came under the jurisdiction of the French courts. … Meunier argues that this definition was left out of the final decree because it would unintention- ally place several categories of individuals under the jurisdiction of French laws against their wishes.

This flagrant disregard for the provisions of the I 848 law was justi- fied on political grounds. The French did not want to antagonize unneces- sarily the slave owners, most of whom were chiefs in the protectorate zones, with whom the maintenance of good relations was perceived as paramount to French survival.

These studies, along with those by Saar, suggest that the courts were used by both the French and Africans, although to what extent awaits further research.

According to this decree, if a metis could provide proof of his or her French culture, this along with his or her white features was sufficient for citizenship.

Whether France was assimilationist or associationist has been a recur- rent debate in French colonial historiography. The debate is to some extent a useless one, since most students of the subject agree that from the end of the nineteenth century on, France was both. The more interesting questions are, in what context and for what reasons was one of these tendencies dom- inant?

French officials estimated that between 2o,ooo and 25,000 workers from Upper Volta had migrated to Gold Coast in 1928. As was the case with the navetanes, these workers were often fleeing French labor requisitions in their home territories.

Mortality rates between 1925 and 1927 on the Niger Valley dams were be- tween 6 percent and 13 percent.